Thursday, February 3, 2011

New Quilt Top + Personal Achievement

At the end of the day I am occasionally bewildered where it went. There are always a million things to do and never enough tie or energy to even want to do a good many of them. We talked about log cabin blocks at Cursed Quilt this month and I figured that now was as good a time as any to "spend" some of my stash on something. So here it is:

Some of my friends may recognize this as fabric I acquired mostly on our warehouse trip to Happy Quilt. As you can see, it is not a traditional log cabin block. I like the squares quite a lot. The centers were cut 4 1/2 inches and the strips are 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 inches respectively. I cut this before the latest round of Accuquilt arrived so I only used it on the big strips.

The wide strips are all my prints from the palette. I decided to give it a bit of...what...contrast? with the black and cream. I didn't have a solid olive that would work so this lovely subtle print filled in for the last narrow color band. You can see that each block has ONE narrow band except for the very last block I put together which has all three, largely because I didn't want to cut more strips and I had lots of the narrow ones left. Each layout is different with the narrow strip falling in a different position. I am not sure that I am going to be able to give this one away. It suits me, although what I will do with a lap quilt I don't know. (Since the last lap sized quilt top is still unquilted form two summers ago! hehehe)

The last thing to report is my great achievement. I ate a thing from my balcony garden. Check them out....They are pictured next to an actually appropriately sized squash for comparison. These were grown from seeds that came out of an actual squash.  I am not sure if their size is based on engineering for big yield...which conditions my garden did not meet...or because of the constrained growing conditions of my pot/winter balcony...or if perhaps the mold I kept getting on the leaves was just too much for them.  It could also be that they simply didn't ever get pollinated properly and so couldn't manage.  There weren't actually any seeds in them I don't think.  At any rate, they were very cute.

The final verdict was that their texture was a bit smoother than normal, a bit starchier rather than stringy as I usually expect squash to be.  But in any case, we will hum that Primary song that no one actually seems to know "The Prophet Says to Plant a Garden" and feel satisfied.  Be productive somehow today, even if the only thing you produce is mess. k.

2 comments:

Living Lavallee said...

That is just amazing! It's gorgeous, and I can see why you wouldn't care to part with it.

I grew a different variety of squash in a bucket once, and they were mini sized like that - very cute, same thing with a watermelon and honeydew. You can help them pollinate. Take a "male" flower (no fruit behind it - more plentiful than the female ones) and "kiss" it to a female flower, getting pollen on the right parts.

I didn't even realize there was a cursed quilt blog - now I know! Maybe if I ever showed up on time...

Jennefer said...

Beautiful quilt as always.

Strangely the vegetables I grew on my balcony last year were quite small as well. Although they tasted fine. We had some tomatoes and lettuce. I'll have to try it again some time.